Prompted with curating a display of artwork by Stanford alumni for the Stanford in New York Center, we visited the studios and spaces of artists making work in and around New York City. The visits reflected a range of subject matter and mediums, out of which the framework for this show emerged. While some of the alumni artwork loosely reflects the framing themes of the Stanford in New York program (Fall: the Arts, Architecture, Design & Urban Studies; Winter: Media & Finance; Spring: The Global City), we chose not to impose a narrative thread that claims to connect the work, as our conversations with the artists communicated varied motivations, intentions, and sensibilities.

Elliot Luscombe’s stop motion videos inspired the title of the show, photographically flashing through his experience of New York City, frame by frame, as a way to pause and process the city’s speed and energy. Mae Ryan’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles and nearby Owens Lake, where much of Southern California’s water comes from, provide stunning perspective into resource distribution and urban networks. Amy Fung-yi Lee’s painted media channels explore where we get our information and the personal sites of connection where this material is transmitted and experienced. Emma Webster’s painting practice deftly shifts scale and sense of space to distort and call into question our capacity to grasp the world around us.

During our visits with Stanford alumni artists, we found ourselves sharing experiences from our college years—collective mural making at Terra and Chi Theta Chi co-ops, archival research at Special Collections, and study abroad to Berlin, Cape Town, and more. This reminiscing dovetailed into contemporary conversations about community at Afropunk music festival in Brooklyn, photography trips to the South as well as to view the solar eclipses’ path of totality, and creative development in graduate school and beyond. Throughout our conversations, a common thread was the impact of Stanford’s creative community upon all of our work, then and now.